Archive for March 2014

In his farewell address in 1796, George Washington warned the nation he had served as its first president against a “passionate attachment” or “inveterate hatred” toward any nation. Some Americans were impassioned about revolutionary France. Within a few years, agents of foreign minister Talleyrand would boast to American diplomats of French power within the United States, and demand large bribes and loans to advance relations. The correspondence was eventually published in the US, in the XYZ Affair, which embarrassed France and the French party in the US, and incited US opinion against France. The rupture was not permanent, and relations eventually resumed on dispassionate terms, to the benefit of both countries.

Since the 1992 publication of The Passionate Attachment: America’s Involvement With Israel, 1947 to the Present, by George W. Ball, undersecretary of state for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and his son Douglas B. Ball, Washington’s prescient term has become ubiquitous to describe the US-Israel relationship. No agents of Israel have ever been embarrassed by boasting of Israel’s power in the US, or by demanding loans and aid. The protestations of American diplomats at Israel’s aggrandizement and damage to US interests have embarrassed them, not the pro-Israel party, which has gone from strength to strength until quite recently.

UPDATE: The so-called NSA “whistleblower” Edward Snowden worked as a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc., a security and defense contractor to defense and intelligence agencies. Might Snowden’s bosses at Booz Allen have a passionate attachment to what Snowden’s media custodian Glenn Greenwald oddly described as America’s “Israeli ally” on an Israeli TV channel, owned in part by the unconvicted Israeli nuclear spy Arnon Milchan, in which the former porn industry profiteer called for the release from prison of convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard?

Dr. Ralph W. Shrader, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, and President of Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. has been honored with a leadership award from B’nai B’rith (Children of the Covenant) International, a self-described “staunch defender of the State of Israel” and founder of the Anti-Defamation League, a U.S.-based de facto front for Israeli intelligence; while Horacio D. Rozanski, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., sits on the board of advisors for the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts and the Jewish Primary Day School of the Nation’s Capital.

When Israeli Congressional asset Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) appeared on the “born again” Jewish David Gregory’s “Meet the Press” show on NBC, whose Jewish chairman and CEO, Brian L. Roberts, is a recipient of the Simon Wiesenthal Center‘s 2004 Humanitarian Award, to insinuate that Russian intelligence may be behind Snowden’s NSA leak, he only helped add to the suspicion that the intelligence services of America’s dubious “Israeli ally” were the more likely source of Snowden’s foreign assistance.